Viveza de imagen, actitud ante la muerte y ansiedad ante la muerte en personas de diferentes edades

Abstract

Although death is a natural and inevitable phenomenon that is part of the life cycle (Neimeyer, Wittkowski, & Moser, 2004), in most people it provokes reactions of fear and anxiety (Gómez-Sancho, 2005; Neimeyer & Van Brunt, 1995, Tomás-Sábado & Gómez-Benito, 2003), constituting anxiety about death, one of the fundamental causes of all human anxiety (Aries, 1999, Limonero, 1996). On the other hand, the interest that is emerging in the field of psychology to study mental representation, its forms and modes of operation, is making the theme of the image and everything that entails, is a key point in the work research. We do not know if mental images influence death anxiety, but we know that they influence many variables that are intimately related to death anxiety. Therefore, in this research, through 3 studies, we want to know how the Swiftness of image, the Image of death, the Ailment, and the Attitude towards death in the Anxiety before death, affect participants of different ages. For this, the following scales are applied: Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ, Marks, 1973), Death Attitude Profile-Revised (DAP-R, Wong, Reker and Gesser, 1994), Death Anxiety Scale (DAS, Templer, 1970), Scale of Illness, and Scale of death image, to a group of 300 students of 3rd and 4th of ESO (Study 1) and to a group of 300 university students of 3rd and 4th of different Degrees (Study 2). In turn, we want to know how age influences (Study 3) in each of these variables, and for that we take the participants and data from the two previous studies (two different age groups).